Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  In 1901, William Digby calculated the net amount: See William Digby, Indian Problems for English Consideration, London: National Liberal Federation, 1881 and ‘Prosperous’ British India, 1901.

  A list of Indian Army deployments overseas by the British: H. S. Bhatia (ed.), Military History of British India, 1607–1947, New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1977.

  Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter ‘Amritsar’: Ibid, p. 101.

  Every British soldier posted to India: Bill Nasson, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004.

  Biscuits, rice…authorized to the European soldier, came from Indian production: Bhatia, Military History, p. 152.

  ‘how little human life and human welfare’: Howitt, pp. 40–41.

  In the oft-quoted words of the Cambridge imperial historian John Seeley: John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures, London: Macmillan, 1883, p. 243.

  ‘The mode by which the East India Company’: Howitt, English in India, p. 9.

  ‘The British empire in India was the creation of merchants’: Ferdinand Mount, The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805–1905, London: Simon & Schuster, 2015, p. 773.

  Mr. Montgomery Martin, after examining: Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.

  Indian shipbuilding…offers a more complex but equally instructive story: This section relies heavily on Indrajit Ray, 1995, ‘Shipbuilding in Bengal under Colonial Rule: A Case of “De-Industrialisation”, The Journal of Transport History, 16 (1), pp. 776–77.

  India’s once-thriving shipbuilding industry collapsed: Ibid

  The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 433.

  Even Miss Prism…could not fail to take note: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II, London: Leonard Smithers and Company, 1899.

  English troopers in battle would often dismount and swap their own swords: Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, its Officers and Men, London: Penguin, 1974, p. 39.

  India ‘missed the bus’ for industrialization, failing to catch up on the technological innovations: See, for instance, Akhilesh Pillalmarri, ‘Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations’, The Diplomat, 24 July 2015; Raheen Kasam, ‘Reparations for Colonial India? How about railways, roads, irrigation, and the space programme we still pay for’, 22 July 2015, www.breitbart.com; and Foreman, ‘Reparations for the Raj?.

  The humming factories of Dundee, the thriving shipyards, and the remittances home: See Scotland and the British Empire, John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Also see Martha MacLaren, British India and British Scotland 1780–1830, Akron, Ohio: Akron University Press, 2012.

  CHAPTER 2: DID THE BRITISH GIVE INDIA POLITICAL UNITY?

  ‘considering its long history, India has had but a few hours’: Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography, New York: Harmony Books. See also William Dalrymple’s review of the book for The Guardian, 27 July 2012.

  having once been a British colony is the variable most highly correlated with democracy: Taken from Seymour Martin Lipset, Kyoung-Ryung Seong and John Charles Torres, ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy’, International Social Science Journal, 1993, 45, pp. 155–75.

  ‘every country with a population of at least 1 million’: Myron Weiner, ‘Empirical Democratic Theory’, in E. Ozbudun and M. Weiner (ed.), Competitive Elections in Developing Countries, Durham, NC: Duke University, 1987, pp. 3–34.

  ‘In India,’ wrote an eminent English civil servant: H. Fielding-Hall, Passing of the Empire, London: Hurst & Blackett, 1913, p. 134.

  ‘a society of little societies’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 14.

  ‘Areas in which proprietary rights in land’: See, for instance, Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, ‘History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India’, The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2005, pp. 1190–1213.

  ‘We may be regarded as the spring which’: Forrest, 1918, p. 296.

  William Bolts, a Dutch trader…wrote in 1772: Bolts, 1772, p. vi.

  ‘Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant’: Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company’.

  The British charges against the rulers they overthrew: Hyndman: Report on India, 1907, Ruin of India by British, pp. 513–533.

  ‘partly to amaze the indigenes, partly to fortify’: Jan Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, London: Faber & Faber, 1978.

  Years later, the management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson: C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, London: John Murray, 1958.

  reflected what the British writer David Cannadine dubbed ‘Ornamentalism’: David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, London: Allen Lane, 2001.

  ‘frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers’: David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

  ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’: Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to his Daughter, London: Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1949, p. 94.

  ‘a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India’: For sympathetic accounts of the lives, careers and points of view of the British in India, see Philip Mason, The Men Who Ruled India, New York: W. W. Norton, 1985 and Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj, London: Abacus, 1988.

  The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent: Figures from Maddison, ‘The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India’, in Class Structure.

  ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled’: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, Hachette, 2010, p. 82.

  In David Gilmour’s telling, they had no illusions: From David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, pp. 5, 33, 19, 244.

  ‘The whole attitude of Government to the people it governs’: Fielding-Hall, Passing of the Empire, p. 54.

  ‘constructed a world of letters, ledgers and account books’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 128.

  He paid a Bengali clerk in the Collector’s office to tell him: Ibid, p. 140.

  ‘The new system was not designed’: Ibid, pp. 128–129.

  ‘allowed British officials to imagine’: Ibid, p. 225.

  ‘Collector of the Land Revenue. Registrar of the landed property’: Hyndman, Ruin of India by British.

  In the summer capital of Simla: Gilmour, The Ruling Caste, p. 271.

  ‘ugly pallid bilious men’: Gilmour, The Ruling caste, p. 104.

  ‘A handful of people from a distant country’: Henry W. Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, London: Harper & Brothers, 1908, p. 329.

  ‘India is…administered by successive relays of English carpet-baggers’: H. M. Hyndman, Ruin of India by British, pp. 513–33.

  Insulated from India by their upbringing and new social circumstances: See a detailed account in Anne de Courcy, The Fishing-Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012.

  -8The places named for the British have mostly been renamed: Gilmour, The Ruling Caste.

  ‘the Government of India is not Indian, it is English’: Fielding-Hall, Passing of Empire, p. 182.

  Government must do its work: Ibid, p. 194.

  ‘it would be impossible to place Indian civilians’: Ibid, p. 188.

  ‘Socially he belongs to no world’: Ibid, p. 193.

  ‘educated Indians whose development the Government encourages’: British Rule Condemned, p. 13.

  On the verge of being dismissed, Mahmud…resigned in 1892: Jon Wilson, ‘The Temperament of Empire. Law and Conquest in Late Nineteenth Cen
tury India’, from Gunnel Cederlof and Sanjukta Das Gupta, Subjects, Citizens and Law: Colonial and Postcolonial India, Routledge, 2016.

  ‘If an Indian in such a position tries to preserve his self-respect’: Ibid.

  In the first decades of the twentieth century, J. T. Sunderland observed: Sunderland, 1929.

  ‘With the material wealth go also’: Dadabhai Naoroji, ‘The Moral Poverty of India and Native Thoughts on the Present British Indian Policy (Memorandum No. 2, 16th Nov, 1880)’, 1880, reproduced in Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.

  It is instructive to note the initial attitudes of whites in India: Two books that cover this theme especially well are Jonathan Gil Harris, The First Firangis, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015 and William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, London: Harper Perennial, 2002.

  ‘it was almost as common for Westerners to take on the customs’: Dalrymple, White Mughals.

  ‘the wills of company officials show that one in three’: Ibid.

  ‘our Eastern empire…has been acquired’: Quoted by Wilson, India Conquered, p. 163.

  ‘a passive allegiance,’ Malcolm added: Dalrymple, White Mughals.

  ‘Hundreds, if not thousands, on their way from Burma perished’: Quoted by Wilson, India Conquered, pp. 449–450.

  This very metaphor pops up in the quarrel: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, London: Allen Lane, 1924, pp. 50–51.

  ‘Naboth is gone now, and his hut is ploughed into its native mud’: Rudyard Kipling, ‘Naboth’, in Life’s Handicap (1891), republished by Echo Books, London, 2007, p. 289.

  ‘sometimes with a rare understanding, sometimes with crusty, stereotyped contempt’: Philip Mason, Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow and The Fire, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, 1975, p. 27.

  ‘part of the defining discourse of colonialism’: Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 25.

  ‘brave island-fortress/of the storm-vexed sea’: Sir Lewis Morris, ‘Ode’, The Times, London, 22 June 1897.

  ‘be the father and the oppressor of the people’: Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire, p. 4.

  ‘Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon”’: Rudyard Kipling, Kim, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 1.

  the imperial enterprise required men of courage: See the detailed discussion in M. Daphne Kurtzer, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 13–44.

  ‘There is something noble in putting the hand of civilization’: Quoted in C. J. Wan-ling Wee, Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern, New York: Lexington Books, 2003, p. 80.

  ‘the ennobling and invigorating stimulus’: Ibid, pp. 80–81.

  ‘Imperialism,’ Robert Kaplan suggests: Robert Kaplan, ‘In Defense of Empire’ The Atlantic, April 2014.

  ‘[if] this chapter of reform led directly or necessarily’: Morley, Indian Speeches London, 1910, 91, in Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Struggle for Pakistan, University of Karachi, 1969, p. 28.

  C. A. Bayly makes an impressive case: Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

  ‘it [the Congress] was a model of order’: Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, p. 327.

  The chairman…summarized the history of the last year: Ibid, pp. 129–30, 132.

  The British government in India has not only deprived: www.gktoday. in/poorna-swaraj-resolution-declaration-of-independence.

  Unrest in India was occasioned by…the contemptuous disregard: Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, p. 322.

  In historical texts, it often appears: M. B. L. Bhargava, India’s Services in the War, Allahabad: Bishambher Nath Bhargava, 1919.

  Never in the history of the world: Cited in Durant, The Case for India.

  CHAPTER 3: DEMOCRACY, THE PRESS, THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM AND THE RULE OF LAW

  ‘evangelical imperialism’: Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2003, p. 125.

  ‘the most distinctive feature of the Empire’: Ibid, pp. xxiii, 56, 125.

  ‘India, the world’s largest democracy’: Ibid, pp. 332, 326, 358.

  ‘not only underwrites the free’: Niall Fergusson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, New York: Penguin, 2004, p. 2.

  ‘have I seen more deliberate attempts’: Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, p. 206 et seq.

  This is why I have repeatedly advocated a presidential system for India: See my essay on the subject in India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in our Times, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015.

  ‘they rejected it with great emphasis’: Bernard Weatherill, ‘Relations between Commonwealth Parliaments and the House of Commons’, RSA Journal, Vol. 137 No. 5399, October 1989, pp. 735–741. Published by Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

  ‘the crushing of human dignity’: Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1958, p. 236.

  ‘the law that was erected can hardly be said’: Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne (eds), Law, History and Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, cited in Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’ Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, July 2006, pp. 602–627. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies. www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503593.

  ‘a body of jurisprudence written’: Wilson, India Conquered, pp. 213–4.

  When Lord Ripon…attempted to allow Indian judges: These details may all be found in Durant, The Case for India, pp. 138–139.

  When Robert Augustus Fuller fatally assaulted his servant: Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006, pp. 462–93.

  Punch wrote an entire ode to ‘The Stout British Boot’: ‘The British Boot’, Punch 68, (30 January 1875), p. 50, quoted in Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006, pp. 462–93.

  Martin Wiener proposed an ‘export’ model: Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 11.

  ‘I will not be a party to any scandalous hushings up’: Nayana Goradia, Lord Curzon: The Last of the British Moguls, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  ‘there is a great and dangerous gap between the people and the Courts’: Fielding-Hall, Passing of the Empire, p. 103.

  ‘compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance’: Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, p. 204.

  women on the Malabar Coast: This is described brilliantly in Manu Pillai, The Ivory Throne, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015.

  The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority: D. M. Peers and N. Gooptu (eds), India and the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  The scholar Sanjay Nigam’s work has shown: Sanjay Nigam, 1990, ‘Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth’, Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype The Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India’, and ‘Part 2: the Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 27, p. 131–164 and 257–287.

  We declare it Our royal will and pleasure: ‘Her Majesty’s Proclamation (1858)’, India Office Records, Africa, Pacific and Asia collections, British Library, London: L/P&S/6/463 file 36, folios 215–16.

  ‘Our religion is sublime, pure, and beneficent’: Qu
oted in Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of the British Empire in India, New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1997, p. 223.

  ‘The first, and often the only, purpose of British power in India’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 6.

  ‘there were no major changes in village society, in the caste system’: Maddison, Class Structure.

  The fact is that the British interfered with social customs: See, for example, the impassioned appeals by anti-slavery campaigners for the British government to put an end to certain traditional practices of servitude, which were of course completely ignored by Company officialdom: Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection, A Brief View of Slavery in British India, 1841, Manchester, England: The University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/60228274

  CHAPTER 4: DIVIDE ET IMPERA

  in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland: Caesar Litton Falkiner, Illustrations of Irish History and Topography, Mainly of the 17th Century. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1904, p. 117.

  not only were ideas of community reified, but also entire new communities: Norman G. Barrier, The Census in British India: New Perspectives, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1981.

  ‘Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained’: Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

  ‘In the conceptual scheme which the British created’: Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among The Historians And Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. See also Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

  The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.

  ‘capable of expressing, organizing, and’: Dirks, 2001.

  caste, he says, ‘was just one category among many’: Ibid.

  in Partha Chatterjee’s terms, the colonial argument for why civil society: For more details, see Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, Columbia University Press, 2011 and The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories’, Princeton University Press, 1993.